Page 158 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Slow Burn

pointing at the stove; further, he could not have fallen in any other
direction. Nevertheless, his head was placed next to the stove and his
feet out toward the table. Therefore, if he were unconscious at the
moment of impact, as we have been assuming, he could not have
subsequently moved into the position we found him. That suggests
rearrangement by someone else, does it not?”
“I suppose so. Do you want me to practice falling on the floor to
prove it?” I was really taking advantage of her good mood.
“That will not be necessary, unless we need a substitute for the
department’s crash-test dummy. Given the possibility of foul play,
our next task is to find evidence that death did not occur as a
consequence of a quite-credible accidental self-torching. No bullets
or other weapons were recovered from the crime scene, and ninety-
nine percent of the soft tissue of the body has gone up in smoke. All
that we have to work with are the charred extremities. The hands
were sufficiently preserved to provide a good set of fingerprints. We
have confirmed the identity of the victim; he was, indeed, the resident
of Apartment 5, and not a substituted corpse. The lab also weighed
the ash and calculated that only one body had been cremated in that
spot.”
“That’s good to know.” I hadn’t considered any other possibility.
So it was time to pay attention.
“If the victim, one Alberto Carbone, had been stabbed first, and
the knife taken away, we would still be able to find some bloodstains
on the floor. But there were none. If he had been poisoned,
suffocated, strangled or electrocuted we would have no means of
detecting it; again, not enough tissue. The neck bones are gone, any
remaining blood has cooked and altered chemically. But we do have
the skull.”
I could imagine her playing Hamlet, standing in a cemetery
pondering the cause of death of Yorick.
“Look at this, Duncan: under ultraviolet, you can see the
characteristic radiating lines of a compression fracture on the back of
the head. Perfectly natural, considering Mr. Carbone took a fall. The
question for us is whether or not that blow was suffered by his head
cracking against the floor. Here I have been aided by forensic science
as well as elementary physics. Force equals mass times acceleration.
The mass is the victim; the acceleration is a simple calculation based

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